Hey guys building a rig for my friend, dont have time to pick the parts etc as i have exams and assignments due this week! Anywhere from 2000-2300$ . The site i'll be using will be pccasegear.com & the rig will mainly be used for gaming ! Thanks johnny

Hi,
Cheers
Edit: To be honest the price of the GTX 680 is f'n bs, basically just to have a GTX 680 means that the other parts in your 2K build has to be sacraficed.
Hope nvidia chokes on their profits!!!!
Better yet, I hope AMD punches Nvidia in the proverbial nuts sometime soon.

I noticed that even if you play at 1680x1050, a better GPU would make things like antialiasing performance a lot better. I know that I have to scale down on some special effects and antialiasing in Battlefield 3 in order to get an avg. of 55 - 60 fps (with vsync on, I can't stand tearing) on my Radeon HD 6870.

Resolution is only one of several factors to think about when quoting a GPU.

I noticed that even if you play at 1680x1050, a better GPU would make things like antialiasing performance a lot better. I know that I have to scale down on some special effects and antialiasing in Battlefield 3 in order to get an avg. of 55 - 60 fps (with vsync on, I can't stand tearing) on my Radeon HD 6870.

Resolution is only one of several factors to think about when quoting a GPU.

deltatux

I didn't mean the GPU you recommended would be overkill for 1680, that's user-dependent. I meant that we still need to know what the monitor is because if it's to be upgraded, the builds recommended here will have to change to accommodate the cut in budget.

Yeah that last list of specs is $800 worth of card by the time you include the cooler! :S

From personal experience, the ST2000DM001 2TB Seagate drive choice may be a bit questionable - although it seems to be the case if you do a complete write across the whole drive (using the diskpart clean all command), maybe even twice, they run a lot better!... this needs to be the very absolute first thing you do, as everything including the partition info and data area is written with 0's. This does not hide bad sectors on the drive - I recommend after you do that you do a long read test in Seatools. The clean all command appears to do nothing whilst it process (something like 5 hours?) and the Seatools test probably takes 5 hours as well - thats to verify the drive is okay to go.

It won't really cause extra wear on the drive mechanics, since the clean all command and long read test is sequential. The clean all command just seems to prepare the magnetic surface?...

This could be, and sounds, complete bull I know, but talking experience (both mine and two friends), it seems to work! The only drives I had to send back, and the two friends with the same problem, were drives that this preparation process had NOT been done on! One was local so could see its the same thing, the other was online with a friend I hadn't seen for ages - but he's competent with computers. My point is, I had 5 drives (2 I didn't do this process on, the 2 I sent back). The local friend bought 3, 1 sent back because he couldn't have been bothered after processing 2 drives, and likewise the online friend just got an exchange for 1 because after doing 1 he thought it was pointless, and the problematic drives were all the drives where the process hadn't been done on! coincidence? maybe.

I should point out failure wasn't usually straight away, it took about 3 weeks of use or more, 1 week for the local friend, and maybe 2? for the online friend. For all three computers, these are on 24/7, with no power saving spin-down - so factoring that in, it might have taken a few months otherwise?... who knows. The errors for me shows up because one of the bad sectors corrupted data I was trying to access, and in all other cases they only showed up in the long read Seatools tests.

Sorry for the thread hijack, just wanted to put that info out there to save people data loss and inconvenience.

I quickly put that together, i myself haven't done research either tho.

EDIT: Most of the stuff seems a bit overpriced to me, I think I can build a better rig for $2000. And assuming it's a for a monitor resolution of 1080p, there's no need to spend more than $1500 or so to get great performance and quality. If it's for a lower resolution, the remaining $500 should be spent on a good 1080p+ monitor.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Weecka

^^ this + an ssd drive, increases annoying boot times, and i'd persoanally wait for GTX 670 release as from the previews i've seen it will be almost as quick as 680 with quite lower price.

EDIT: Most of the stuff seems a bit overpriced to me, I think I can build a better rig for $2000. And assuming it's a for a monitor resolution of 1080p, there's no need to spend more than $1500 or so to get great performance and quality. If it's for a lower resolution, the remaining $500 should be spent on a good 1080p+ monitor.